Project Talent tested many teenagers in the 1960s and followed them until recently, finding that men with lower mechanical ability and women with lower linguistic ability had a higher risk for dementia. Constantine Lyketsos, an Alzheimer’s expert at Johns Hopkins, says education helps.

Lyketsos: On top of that can we do specific types of training? And the answer is probably yes, but we get into all kinds of questions: what kind of training, at what part of life, how much do you have to maintain it, how hard is it to do the training, how hard is it to get people to do the training. :16

Lyketsos says there’s a hypothesis behind more training.

Lyketsos: There’s this idea that the more we build up your reserve well before, the better off you’re going to be when you get into the ago of risk, so that you might get a lot of plaques, amyloid and tau in your brain but not get symptoms, you don’t care about how much amyloid and tau in your brain as you care that you don’t get symptoms. :17